Yahoo news post

[Bald Cypress]

The last Paragraph says it. $15000 for a basic model. For me, thats a bit to much.




https://www.yahoo.com/news/stylish-camp ... 57294.html

[tony.latham]

I'm not going into the teardrop business, but if someone talked me into building a 5 x 10' I'd probably be talking the $12 to $15G mark and tell the guy I wasn't cutting corners. It takes me $4G in materials and at least ten weeks of time.

Hopefully it's a quality product.

Tony

[noseoil]

I'm at about 450 hours build time & $6,500 in materials. I know this is a bit over the top in terms of time & materials, but we did everything as well as we possibly could & have plenty of good stuff with a solid build. I admit I didn't need the TV set, sound bar & DVD, we could get by with a Coleman stove instead of the stove & oven combo & an AGM battery isn't necessary either. A solar panel for charging isn't a must, but it's not a luxury. We could have gotten by with a thin foam mattress instead of the 5" very good foam one we bought, with a 3" memory foam topper. We don't need to have port holes in the sides either for that matter, but...

At $20 an hour for labor & $6,500 parts, that's right at about $15,500 (thankfully my time is free to me). I wouldn't do it any cheaper if someone asked me to sell & build another.

What Tony said. To do a good job on a quality build costs time & money. I'm not counting the actual time spent in research, planning & figuring things out. That probably took 10X longer than the actual build time. My productivity would have been much better if I hadn't worked weekends in the summer in Tucson under a shade tree & canopy.

If you think $15K is expensive, build a nice one & find out what it takes. Keep track of all your costs & see how it turns out. Don't forget to have lots of tools & experience in how to set them up & use them before you start.

[dales133]

Yea 15 grand isnt bad realy.
Id hate to think how many hours ive put in let alone money.
Did 8 hours today and not a great deal to show for it but thats how it goes

[haha49]

Yea 15 grand isnt bad realy.
Id hate to think how many hours ive put in let alone money.
Did 8 hours today and not a great deal to show for it but thats how it goes

Well for a company to make it's allot less hours. They have CNC machines to cut the lumber so really they just need to glue and bolt it together. It's all about an assembly line for 1 person to build it lots of work for machines to cut everything out and you just slap it together much cheaper and you can bang one out a day. That's with 1 persons labor.

If you look at the hours above. 450 times say 10 bucks an hour (cheap labor) that's 4,500 for labor then 6,500 for materials. That's $11,000 to build it and then you have dealer mark up shipping costs. Shipping it is another 1,000 so that's 12,000 then the dealer has to make something and the company so dealer makes 1,000 per unit dealer marks it up to 15,000 so the real cost is around 14,000 once it gets to the dealer. So chances are your only paying 2,000 to 3,000 in mark up

Now if you CNC the walls you cut that labor in half so really at the end of the day the bigger companys make way more profit then the little guys since they have more labor. Now if you move to china your labor goes down to 3-5 per hour. Now you can also get cheaper teardrops in the 2,000-6,000 range much smaller and very basic it all depends on what you want.